Originally, a film production journal and on-going blog about the beach party rock and roll monster movie. Now, this is my Garage Rock blog-- whatever I've recently found or came up on my iPod today.

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Sunday, October 2, 2005

sound mix, color correction for Premiere in Austin

Just in case you haven’t heard: Stomp! Shout! Scream! will have its world premiere on October 21, 2005 as part of the Austin Film Festival and Screenwriters Conference. Visit the festival website for tickets and screening info.

Another part of film making is trying to get people to come see your film. Newspapers and other press outlets are the best resource for letting people know the details. It makes me feel like a pimp, selling my product, but I spent the last week working on press releases, credit lists, a “statement of the director”, formatting news articles, etc., to put in the first official press kit. All that stuff is on the Media page on stompshoutscream.com.

Post-production on the film took a couple of major leaps forward this week. It’s at this stage that you go to the experts and hope they can perform those miracles you always hear about. Director of Photography Evan Lieberman and I supervised the final color correction in Cinefilm’s Spirit transfer suite. Due to the usual time and money constraints of indie film making, we had to shoot several scenes at the wrong time of day. Colorist Ron Anderson worked his magic and fixed all the problem scenes, plus greatly improved several scenes that were already looking good. Now Stomp! Shout! Scream! looks absolutely fantastic. I can’t say enough about Evan, the extremely talented crew he put together, and Ron’s expertise that combined to get this film looking as good as it does.

Michael and Juan at Soapbox Studios put in a Herculean effort over the weekend to finish the sound mix for the movie. Once again, there’s nothing like going to the experts and getting them to work their magic. Everyone involved in the sound mix commented about how we picked one of the hardest possible locations to get quality sound—- the beach, at night. One long dialog scene has waves, a generator, and RF interference competing with the actor’s lines. Michael was able to EQ the voices just right and make the scene, and the whole movie, sound better than I would have ever imagined.

Maybe they’re just being nice, but everyone who has helped on the film says that it was great fun to work on. I started this whole project to have fun with the creative people I know, not because I wanted more work.

Principle photography started one year ago this week. I never thought it would take this long or be this hard, but seeing the color-corrected images finally married up to a pristine sound mix sure feels good. I am really, really looking forward to Austin.